While Canada's federal system could lay claim to some elements of a language policy before the 1960s, the content of this policy was quite narrow. It consisted mainly in guarantees of rights to use English and French in the federal Parliament, federal courts, the Quebec legislature and Quebec courts. The vast bulk of citizen contacts with federal authorities was untouched by law or regulation. In the 1960s, this situation would change. A primary reason was the ‘Quiet Revolution’ in Quebec, which not only transformed and modernized society, but also led to fundamental questioning of the position of Quebec in Canada and of the language situation in both these jurisdictions. In a wider sense, the decade of the 1960s was a period of rapidly expanding contacts between citizens and governments throughout Canada because of an expanding welfare state.

THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON BILINGUALISM AND BICULTURALISM

When the Liberals returned to power after the federal general election of 1963, one of the first acts of the Pearson government was to establish a Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism to study these growing linguistic and political strains in some depth. Also known as the Laurendeau–Dunton Commission, it was one of a series of large-scale public policy investigations that have marked the Canadian political landscape (beginning with the landmark Rowell–Sirois Royal Commission on Dominion–Provincial Relations of 1937).